16/4/00

Congo cowgirl

    When Hava told her father she was working as a call-girl, he took it in stride. An Orthodox prostitute: why not? Nothing about his daughter could surprise him anymore.
    "He didn't even say anything to me," she laughs, tossing back her silky hair. "Afterwards he asked my mother if he really understood what I said."
    He didn't. She had said cowgirl, not call-girl.
    Well, that certainly made sense to him: his daughter was an Orthodox cowgirl -- an Israeli religious Jewish cowgirl -- none of which could have been predicted at the time of her baptism in the Congo.
    Dad's cool, so he had no problem accepting her friends -- ranging from fellow cowpokes to Safed haredim -- and this "kosher" stuff: ok, a bit strange, but he accepted that too. He was learning a bit about the Jewish people.
    But why are his daughters Hava and Bernadette embroiled in a religious dispute?
    Ah, because Hava converted to Judaism and she's Orthodox ... and Bernadette converted to Judaism and she's Reform.

FROM AN early age, 29-year-old Hava de Coninck found herself on the path least traveled.
    She was born and raised in the Congo (then called Zaire), two generations after her grandfather went to the Belgian colony in the '30s to build the railway; her parents eventually returned to Brussels. Hava comes from a country doubly cursed: one of the world's poorest, the Congo is also where AIDS originated, and is the country most profoundly victimized by the virus.
    "It's terrible, there's no word for it. I lived there until 1984; the first time they began talking about AIDS was about 1983."
    She had a correct Christian background: baptism, confirmation at 12, every Sunday in church. "But I stopped going when I was 13. From that age I had lots of questions about Jesus. I didn't know if I believed in God. I knew something was not true in my education, I felt it strongly."
    Bernadette, four years her elder, left home to go traveling, met an Israeli, married, converted, and settled in Avtalyon in the Galilee. Hava came to stay a while. (Their brother visited as well, but he didn't fall under the sway of Judaism and Zionism: he went to live in Cape Verde.)
    "I was amazed when I came upon Judaism -- and it's funny, because it happened on a kibbutz (Harel) that was not religious at all. But it was so obvious there was something strong, I could feel it. My love was first for Israel, the land, and I realized it was like this because of the Torah. I knew that if I wanted to go deeper I had to start learning Torah.
    "But I didn't know I wanted to become Jewish. I wanted to get experienced in agriculture here and then go to developing countries. Four years later, I'm still here."
    After a year and a half, she decided to convert. "Bernadette was in shock. We had a lot of arguments about our beliefs, but we don't talk about it anymore." They were very close as children, and they now live just a few kilometers apart, but "Bernadette doesn't visit me. She was here once. She hates Safed, she says it's too religious, too this, too that."
    Her parents condone their daughters' choices because "It's a principle in the family, they accept everything as long as we're happy. They love Israel, and come once a year for two months. They understand the attraction.
    "They don't understand the [religious] laws, and sometimes they're shocked, horrified. Most difficult is when I go back to Belgium. My mother doesn't know about kashrut, so I go to a supermarket in Brussels where they sell Israeli products.
    "She wants to cook for me, and it really hurts her if I don't eat her food." Hava chuckles, and blushes. "I eat on my special little plate. I just have to accept that I will be insulting people; it's a bad feeling, but there's no choice. You need to find the balance, because you have to think of honoring your mother and father."
    Beautiful, warmhearted and good-humored, beige-eyed, earth-blonde Hava wastes her charms on creatures that moo and bleat. She's working on a JNF project that (if I understand this correctly) studies the interaction of cows and trees.
    I'd better let Hava explain this.
    "We wanted to improve the pasture around Rosh Pina, and one way is to plant trees. So we closed about 150 dunams and planted four species of trees with different treatment -- irrigation, no irrigation, compost, no compost -- to figure out how to improve the pasture, because trees give shade to the cows. We watch to see if the cows eat the fruit or the leaves of the trees. Cows graze, so they don't take much off the trees, but the trees change the ecosystem of the pasture land, which, we hope, causes more good grass to grow. That's our research. Then we try to convince other farmers, kibbutzim, to plant trees."
    The goal is happier cows, for better and cheaper beef. 
    "We have a problem competing with Australian and Argentinian beef, because they have such green pasture. The landscape here is dry grass, and stony."
    She wasn't always in cows.
    "I worked with goats too. We brought in a variety of goats from South Africa for their meat, and I had to follow them around to learn their behavior." Turns out, the goats were curious about her behavior: "At that time I was studying in a seminary, so I went in among the goats with a siddur, and read whenever I had a little time."
    She was a professional goat, becoming accepted as one of the gang. "I  stayed with them and took notes: Now she's walking. Now she's eating this tree. Now she's ... well, at the beginning I was laughing at myself." After 15 months it stopped being funny, and anyway, she learned all there was to know. Her career switched to bovinity.
    "When I moved into cows, I saw the difference in management. Cowboys are much tougher than sheep- and goat-people."
    Uh, cowboys?
    "Yes, we have cowboys in Israel." Hava giggles. "There was even a cowboy course, and I was the only girl. I have a certificate to prove it: I'm a graduate of the Israeli cowboy course!"
    The only certified Zionist cowgirl. They must be very proud of her in the Congo.
    "Well," she hedges, "I'm really only a theoretical cowgirl, because I don't ride horses and catch cows by the horns, and I keep Shabbat." (And she doesn't smoke Marlboros.)
    Hava clearly appreciates the whimsy of her life's unusual direction, so it's hard to tell if she was joking when she mentioned her next goal.
    "I'd like to do miluim [army reserves]," she says, "in the cavalry."